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Christopher O'Riley | |
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 O'Riley (back) accompanying violinist Alice Ivy-Pemberton, 2009 | |
| Background information | |
| Born | 1956 (age 67–68) Chicago, Illinois, United States |
| Genres | Classical |
| Occupation(s) | Pianist, radio host |
| Instrument | Piano |
| Website | www |
Christopher O'Riley is an American classical pianist and public radio show host. He was the host of the weekly National Public Radio program From the Top . O'Riley is also known for his piano arrangements of songs by alternative musicians. [1]
O'Riley was born in 1956 in Chicago, Illinois, United States, and grew up in Evanston, Illinois. He began classical piano studies at the age of 4, and became interested in pop music and started his own band in 6th grade. His dual-track musical interests led him to jazz-rock fusion and included a professional performance in his later high school years with the Pittsburgh alto sax player Eric Kloss. His choice of music school was fortuitous as the New England Conservatory of Music had as its president in the 1970s the composer/historian Gunther Schuller. It was upon entering NEC that O'Riley decided to pursue classical studies exclusively. [2]
In 1981, he won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions. He has received awards at the Leeds, Van Cliburn, Busoni and Montreal competitions, as well as an Avery Fisher Career Grant. O'Riley has made many recordings of classical music. His debut album, a collection of the works of Ferruccio Busoni, including the seldom performed Fantasia Contrappuntistica , was released in 1983. He has since released several recordings, including works of Maurice Ravel, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Jean-Philippe Rameau, John Adams, Igor Stravinsky, and Alexander Scriabin, as well as a recording of Rhapsody in Blue with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
O'Riley is the former host of the weekly National Public Radio program From the Top , on which young musicians are heard and interviewed. According to its website, it is the most popular weekly one-hour classical music show on the air today. O'Riley first began performing Radiohead songs as a time-filler during a break in the program, to supplement preludes and miniatures by composers such as Debussy and Rachmaninoff. Many of those short classical pieces are found on his CD release At the Break. Initially designed as a media platform for all manner of young musicians, From The Top soon became exclusively dedicated to Classical music, and it was in this atmosphere that O'Riley decided to augment the format by inserting, unannounced, his own arrangements, presumably Classical pieces, of Radiohead songs. When listeners were apprised of the title and provenance of the pieces, emails came into the show asking "Who is this Mr. Head and where can I find more of his beautiful music?"
True Love Waits: Christopher O'Riley Plays Radiohead , his recording of his own piano arrangements of songs by the alternative rock band Radiohead, was released in 2003. O'Riley's second Radiohead-derived album, Hold Me To This , followed two years later and contains a different selection of songs. Both albums had moderate success on the classical crossover charts. In 2006, he released a piano tribute to Elliott Smith, Home to Oblivion, again featuring his own arrangements.
O'Riley says that his renditions have introduced the music of Radiohead to a classical audience as well as introducing classical music to a wider or younger audience, as he sometimes performs both standard concert repertoire, such as Shostakovich or Mozart, and Radiohead, Elliott Smith or Nick Drake interpretations at the same concert. O'Riley describes himself as an obsessed Radiohead fan in interviews, and says he was attracted to the multilayered nature of the band's music, leading him to listen to and transcribe lesser known album tracks, live bootleg recordings of performances, b-sides, and even songs never officially released, as well as some of their hit singles. In his liner notes for Home to Oblivion, he calls Elliott Smith "the most important songwriter since Cole Porter," although admitting he was unaware of Smith's music until his apparent suicide in 2003. When asked to explain his unusual choice of material for a classical pianist, O'Riley has often quoted Duke Ellington's statement that "there are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind."
O'Riley's work has often been distinguished from other classical rock-tribute albums by music critics, who note O'Riley's quality of playing. True Love Waits received 4 out of 5 stars from Rolling Stone magazine, allegedly the only "classical" recording to do so, while his Radiohead concert programs have received generally favorable notices from classical critics and promotion on NPR's Performance Today.
O'Riley currently resides in Los Angeles, California. His son, Conor Redmond O'Riley, was born on June 30, 1994, to Chris and his then wife, Marlene Fusaris.
| Release date | Album | Label |
|---|---|---|
| October 1, 2001 | Christopher O'Riley at the Break | From the Top Records |
| June 10, 2003 | True Love Waits: Christopher O'Riley Plays Radiohead | Sony |
| April 12, 2005 | Hold Me to This: Christopher O'Riley Plays Radiohead | World Village Records IODA |
| April 11, 2006 | Home to Oblivion: An Elliott Smith Tribute | World Village Records IODA |
| April 10, 2007 | Second Grace: The Music of Nick Drake | World Village Records IODA |
| August 18, 2009 | Out of My Hands | White Tie Records |
| September 27, 2011 | Shuffle.Play.Listen | Oxingale Productions |
| May 7, 2013 | O'Riley's Liszt | Oxingale Productions |
| February 1, 2015 | Beethoven, Period. Complete Sonatas and variations for Pianoforte and Violoncello. Recorded on period instruments.Matt Haimovitz, Christopher O'Riley. | PENTATONE PTC 5186475 |
| February 1, 2016 | Shuffle. Play. Listen. Works by Igor Stravinsky, Leoš Janáček, Bernard Herrmann, Bohuslav Martinů, Astor Piazzolla. Matt Haimovitz, Christopher O'Riley. | PENTATONE PTC 5186546 |
| September 29, 2017 | PENTATONE OXINGALE SERIES "Troika". Works by Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Rachmaninov. Matt Haimovitz, Christopher O'Riley. | PENTATONE PTC 5186608 |
Steven Paul Smith, known as Elliott Smith, was an American musician and singer-songwriter. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska, raised primarily in Texas, and lived much of his life in Portland, Oregon, where he gained popularity. Smith's primary instrument was the guitar, though he also played piano, clarinet, bass guitar, drums, and harmonica. He had a distinctive vocal style in his solo career after Heatmiser, characterized by his "whispery, spiderweb-thin delivery", and often used multi-tracking to create vocal layers, textures, and harmonies that were usually finger picked and recorded with tape.
Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff was a Russian composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music. Early influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and other Russian composers gave way to a thoroughly personal idiom notable for its song-like melodicism, expressiveness, dense contrapuntal textures, and rich orchestral colours. The piano is featured prominently in Rachmaninoff's compositional output and he used his skills as a performer to fully explore the expressive and technical possibilities of the instrument.
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I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings is a live album by the English rock band Radiohead, released on 12 November 2001 in the UK by Parlophone and a day later in the US by Capitol Records.
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"Knives Out" is a song by the English rock band Radiohead, released as the second single from their fifth album, Amnesiac (2001). It features lyrics about cannibalism and guitars influenced by the Smiths.
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The Warsaw Concerto is a short work for piano and orchestra by Richard Addinsell, written for the 1941 British film Dangerous Moonlight, which is about the Polish struggle against the 1939 invasion by Nazi Germany. In performance it normally lasts just under ten minutes. The concerto is an example of programme music, representing both the struggle for Warsaw and the romance of the leading characters in the film. It became very popular in Britain during World War II.
True Love Waits: Christopher O'Riley Plays Radiohead is the first tribute album by classical pianist Christopher O'Riley of songs by the alternative rock band Radiohead.
Hold Me to This: Christopher O'Riley Plays Radiohead is the second tribute album by classical pianist Christopher O'Riley of songs by the rock band Radiohead, the first being True Love Waits. Like O'Riley's earlier album, Hold Me To This surveys a broad range of Radiohead's work, producing piano arrangements of complex tracks such as "2 + 2 = 5," "Like Spinning Plates" and "Paranoid Android."
Sir Stephen Andrew Gill Hough is a British-born classical pianist, composer and writer. He became an Australian citizen in 2005 and thus has dual nationality.
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Home to Oblivion: An Elliott Smith Tribute is a 2006 instrumental tribute album to Elliott Smith by pianist Christopher O'Riley. The album received mixed reviews from critics.
Conrad Yiwen Tao is an American composer and pianist and former violinist. Tao's piano and violin performances since childhood brought him early recognition at music festivals and competitions. At age 13, he was featured on the PBS TV series From the Top – Live from Carnegie Hall as violinist, pianist and composer. He won eight consecutive ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards. Among his compositions have been commissions by the New York Philharmonic, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Pacific Symphony and Dallas Symphony Orchestra.
"True Love Waits" is a song by the English rock band Radiohead. Radiohead worked on it for over two decades before releasing it on their ninth album, A Moon Shaped Pool (2016).
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